Investigating secondary school EFL teachers’ attitudes towards teaching

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the attitudes that teachers hold with regard to teaching English supra-segmentals or prosodies, particularly stress and intonation. It is a case study that took place in nine (9) secondary schools in Bejaia city and its suburbs. We adopted a descriptive research design based on a mixed methodology, which is both quantitative and qualitative by using two data collection tools, a questionnaire and an interview. The former was administered to twenty-six (26) teachers of English but only five (5) of them accepted to be interviewed. The findings revealed that secondary school teachers consider that stress and intonation play an important role in EFL students’ spontaneity in speech, intelligibility and communicative competence. However, as clearly stated in the results, the process of teaching the prosodies of English constitutes a big challenge since many difficulties are facing the teachers such as lack of students’ motivation, lack of opportunities to practice EFL, the wash back effects of the baccalaureate exam, time constraints and lack of adequate instructional materials and professional training. To this regard, in order to give the teaching of prosody a chance to succeed in the secondary school level, it is recommended that teachers raise their students’ motivation towards the importance of the speaking skill. Likewise, providing adequate instructional materials that help teachers to teach EFL prosodies in authentic situations is recommended through the provision of a variety of tasks. Furthermore, training sessions can be offered to EFL teachers to ensure a better teaching of prosodies.